Michelle Williams Discusses Her ‘Impressive’ ‘The Fabelmans’ Co-Star: A Monkey
Steven Spielberg’s relationship with his parents is a clear influence on the family dynamics in some of his biggest movies. His new film, The Fabelmans, drops the subtext and digs deep into the filmmaker’s childhood memories to explain how they serve as the foundation for his cinematic worldview.
Michelle Williams plays Mitzi Fableman, the barely-fictionalized version of Spielberg’s mother, Leah Adler. Williams gets several scenes to express Mitzi’s manic lust for life, such as when she bought a pet monkey to mask much more serious issues. The incident was a symptom of domestic tumult at the time, but Williams loved working with her animal co-star during production.
Williams plays an unfulfilled housewife in ‘The Fabelmans’
Just as in real life, Mitzi is the creative parent in the household. She is a trained pianist who cut her own ambitions to raise her children and encourages Sammy to pursue his interest in creating art despite the concerns of her engineer husband Burt’s (Paul Dano) desire for their kid to find an occupation that’s more functional and stable.
Her unpredictable instincts can be delightful, like when she captivates the entire family with her dancing during a camping trip. Still, her decision to pack all the kids into the car to follow an active tornado speaks to her inner instability. As the Fablemans move across the country for Burt’s work and Mitzi suffers a couple of personal losses, her mood gets worse, and she takes drastic measures to rouse herself out of a funk.
To the surprise of everyone else in the family, Mitzi buys a pet monkey named Bennie to keep her company in California. (It’s not a coincidence that Bennie is also the name of their close family friend, played by Seth Rogan.) She says she got Bennie “because I needed a laugh,” but Spielberg understood that it was the act of a woman suffering in silence.
“The monkey Leah brought home was a grand distraction, but it was also a therapeutic companion for my mom, who was really at that time in our lives going through a major depression,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter.
Williams’ Academy Award-nominated performance in The Fabelmans is one of the reasons the film is thought of so highly. When speaking about the apart to Vanity Fair in a video going through the biggest roles of her career, she praised the script for showing the multitudes of Mitzi’s personality without shaming her for her worst moments.
“I just thought [it was] a feast, and they let her live as a woman. She was a girl, she was a woman, and then she became a mother,” Williams said. “A mother is one part of her identity. I also felt like they didn’t judge her for the choices that she made. I felt like she was allowed to live without punishment or apology. And that really, the way that she lived her life, is celebrated by the way Steven has lived his life.”
Williams enjoyed collaborating with the monkey
As emotionally fraught as the latter Mitzi scenes in The Fabelmans are, Williams found working with the monkey, a female capuchin named Crystal, to be an absolute delight.
“That monkey was so impressive. I was like, I wanna go to monkey acting school,” the human actor said in a video for Vanity Fair exploring the biggest roles of her career. “There is nothing she can’t do. And just pure presence, like you, really gotta be careful, or that monkey’s gonna upstage you. All animals can upstage you.”
Crystal wasn’t just an asset to the movie. She also led a teaching moment by showing Williams’ youngest child how to high-five. The actor’s glowing review matters more, especially when she makes it clear that another animal really does not know how to bring it on screen. “I’ll tell you what’s not better is a pigeon. Not my favorite scene partner.”
Using a live animal in a production comes with plenty of risks
Crystal the capuchin is a veteran of the entertainment industry. She was a star of The Hangover franchise and has appeared in over 20 movies since making her debut in George of the Jungle in 1997, as well as a few sitcoms, most notably in Community as the vent-dwelling primate named Annie’s Boobs.
Crystal has a spot-free track record, but working with a live animal doesn’t always go so smoothly. David Schwimmer had such a contentious relationship with the monkey on Friends that he once wished for its death in an interview. The unforgettable freakout of Gordy the chimp in Nope parallels a real-life incident where a chimp actor named Travis blinded a woman and left her with several severe injuries.
And there was also the time when Danny DeVito, as seen in the video above, got bit in the crotch by a monkey on the set of Batman Returns while dressed as The Penguin. The most violent examples of monkey misbehavior all involve a human being a little too comfortable around unpredictable creatures. If you ever find yourself in the company of a monkey, it’s wise to exercise plenty of caution.
